Scott Pilgrim vs Earthbound

Dan: It amazes me how many people felt the need to defend their financial involvement with our two choices. I think the hypothesis that can be pulled from these data points would be that geeks are few and vocal. They make a big noise when they want something but once it comes their way, even the full support of their entire numbers can't amount to what the studios would consider monetary success. Rest assured, we weren't pointing any fingers. Well, maybe Chris was...

So, points-wise this one was a low scoring match. The reason for this was mostly because it took a long time to explain what the heck these two properties were, and so there wasn't much time left to make arguments about them. I personally had never heard of Earthboundprior to this debate, which was cool because I got to learn about it.

Chris got the first point by illuminating the loss of Mother 3 (Earthbound 2?) because Earthbound 1 did so poorly. To get a crappy game is much better than knowing that a good game exists, but not getting to play it. Don't tease us!

Kyle gets a point because of my wife. You see, my wife for reasons I forget and she is asleep right now otherwise I would ask her, got to go to the premier of Scott Pilgrim in our neck of the woods. She was actually given a branded guitar pick keychain that is super cool and she still has dangling from her key ring to this day. Couple that with my enjoyment of all the characters in the movie and my love of videogames, I should have been there with her. But I wasn't. I didn't see it until it was on video. I will repeat, to drive this point home; My wife has a Scott Pilgrim keychain guitar pick, and I still did not go to see it in theaters. Point...Kyle.

Chris gets a point by bringing up the music, an oft forgotten part of any game. There are many things in classic movies and games of years past that if you tried to do them today, it just wouldn't work for one reason or another. See The Honeymooners constant threat of spousal abuse if you don't believe me. So for a game to have music from the Beatles, and then not do well, it makes gamers of present day ache with missed opportunity. The Beatles don't just throw their music to any franchise, and when they do you'd think they were launching an Apple product or something.

Kyle mentions sequel-itis, a rare but deadly disease that Hollywood has bad at the moment, and I had to give him a point for that. It's a pretty cut and dry formula; Any movie that does well gets sequels until it gets old, then it's rebooted. Any original movies that don't do well in theaters get squashed to make room for the prior loop. Sad, but true.

I almost didn't give Chris a point for his final argument, but it really spoke to me. We never had Mother 2 but we did have the Scott Pilgrim comics. So just starting out we get exposure to the content without relying on a film or game being made. Then we did get a game and movie, but while Scotty's movie was self-contained, we only got one installment of the Mother saga. Earthbound will always feel incomplete because we know there is another installment that we will never get, whereas Scott Pilgrim will always have the comics as a conduit for us to flow through.

And so, Chris pulls out a win with Earthbound, a game that I started out knowing nothing about and ended up longing for and never getting. It's a bittersweet ending, but at least the Giants won. Take that, Patriots...maybe next time you won't block my Ravens from getting another ring. Jerks.